From The Winner's Curse, by Richard Thaler:

The problem seems to be that while economists have gotten increasingly sophisticated and clever, consumers have remained decidedly human. This leaves open the question of whose behavior we are trying to model. Along these lines, at an NBER conference a couple of years ago I explained the difference between my models and Rober Barro's (a well-known rationalist_ by saying that he assumes the agents in his model are as smart as he is, while I portray people as being as dumb as I am. Barro agreed with this assessment.

Just in case you wanted to fuss with the Guardian's list of books some more, Tim Sandefur and AnnikaGyrl have tallied up their scores (14 and 21, respectively). And since I know you were wondering, here's mine.

14: The Count of Monte Cristo

17: Wuthering Heights*

20: The Scarlet Letter*

27: Anna Karenina

31: Huckleberry Finn*

48: The Great Gatsby*

49: The Trial

53: Brave New World

56: The Big Sleep

59: 1984

61: Catcher in the Rye

63: Charlotte's Web

67: The Quiet American

69: Lolita

73: To Kill a Mockingbird

74: Catch-22*

76: One Hundred Years of Solitude

79: Song of Solomon

82: If on a winter's night a traveller

88: The BFG

*'ed are all the books that I "read" for school, meaning that I can't remember whether I read them in the sense of reading all of the words on their pages, or merely in the sense of reading a lot of the pages and taking quizzes on them.

Simon and Garfunkel, as y'all have probably heard, are on a reunion tour. Except for the occasional Grammy performance, they basically haven't played together in twenty years, but here they go.

Of course, their . . . strained . . . relations have been no secret. One story I read long ago said that they were working on getting back together but had some quarrels about who would get to sing the harmonies. I venture no opinion as to whether that's true.

Anyway, you can listen to/watch two clips of them at a press conference here (scroll down). I've been extremely skeptical of this reunion, but I think this is a definite improvement over, say, the Concert in Central Park.

I should explain, I think the Concert in Central Park (which is 20-odd years old) suffers because they're trying to sing like they're still in the 60s. Now (on these clips, at least) they seem to avoid that trouble. Sure, you can tell they're old, but . . . now they seem to know it, too, and that improves it a lot.

Garfunkel can still hit some high notes, but he doesn't try to hit quite as many, which helps him hit the ones he does. [At their opening concert last night ("the warm-up"), The Everly Brothers hit the stage for a little bit of an intermission. Was this a break to let two aging singers recover a little bit?]

In some sense, my tentative speculation is that an aging artist whose fame depends on the strength or dexterity of his or her voice is faced with two major options. He or she can either weather on, belting out songs with eyes clenched shut, pretending that lost youth has not fled. This is the tactic that was adopted by Maria Callas for the last ten years of her career or so. The trouble is that while this pleases die-hard fans, it's unlikely to win any new admirers. (I'm told that you could tell who really loved Callas by looking at who went to hear her sing in the last few years before she died. You wouldn't go except out of deep-seated loyalty or nostalgia.)

The other option, of course, is to acknowledge age, and make the necessary accomodations. This can be done either by adding more musical accompaniments (which I think is a little shameful) or simply by toning down the song a little bit, by clocking back the tempo, by turning youthful hymn into aging dirge. And this last is, I think, a potent tactic.

For example, though I became a Luciano Pavarotti fan during 11th grade (I had to study an old recording of him singing "Nessun Dorma") I don't like to watch him on T.V. or hear his new productions, because of the coping mechanisms he generally employs-- microphone, background noise, duet singers (though I have a completely inexplicable and shameful soft spot for his duet with Celine Dion-- "I Hate You, Then I Love You"). On the other hand, take Johnny Cash's Hurt from his last CD before his death [Incidentally, I really don't recommend listening to this CD without some bourbon handy. Blanton's simply won't do. Maker's Mark is probably the best choice because drinking Booker's while listening to the CD will pretty much inevitably result in a splitting hangover.]. The reason the video works so well is that it's written in full acknowledgment (and painful embrace) of his age. Indeed, that's true of the entire CD. It's always tempting to read death between the lines of any artist's last work, but sometimes the artist makes it impossible not to. [Thanks to Stuart Buck, you can view Cash's Hurt video here. Be careful with it.]

Now, I make no claim that my preferences about aging artists (that they acknowledge their age and the pain that this brings) are generalizable. But I do think they aren't unique to me. One example of the whole phenomenon is in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's biography of Simon Bolivar (called "The General in His Labyrinth"). A quote:

"Don't tell me you've conquered nostalgia," he said.

"On the contrary: nostalgia has conquered me," said Wilson. "I no longer put up the slightest resistance to it."

"Then do you or don't you want to go back?"

"I don't know anything anymore, General," said Wilson. "I'm at the mercy of a destiny that isn't mine."

The General looked straight into his eyes and said in amazement: "That's what I should be saying."

The poem--which seems just indiscriminately ancient to us--is written by a Christian poet about a pre-Christian world--and it's about a hero whose last, great fight is one he's too old for--so the theme of returning, of dipping in the same river twice, is at least two layers deep.

You'll strain to remember and yearn to forget.

At the age of eighteen you had grander designs,

but in toofewscore years you will hit 58--

drooling over lost loves, in search of lost time,

gumming old lemon rinds, shunning caffeinated tea,

counting sunsets and coffee spoons and staring to the west.

This month's Chicago Magazine features an article on the benefits of marriage. I know other Crescat Sententia bloggers have weighed in on this issue, so I felt it appropriate to address this in my first entry as a guest-blogger.

The article expounds associations between marriage and better health, citing the research of sociologist Linda Waite. Waite's conclusion is that marriage, in general, is good for people:

“It’s like exercise,” she says. “Studies show that, on average, people who exercise experience health benefits. The next step is to say that you should exercise.”

However, the article doesn't present any evidence of causation. Exercise improves health through explicit physiological mechanisms. The article refers to differences between the married and non-married in various health indicators: mortality, depression, health behaviors, income, and insurance status but it doesn't give any real evidence that the contract of marriage itself causes these favorable health outcomes.

It goes on to state that the benefits are unique to marriage and don't extend to cohabitors:

Meanwhile, living together, or cohabiting, “does not confer the same protection as being married,” they write. “The big health difference is between married people and the nonmarried, not between people who live alone and those who don’t.” Waite’s own research of people in their 50s and 60s showed that single adults, “whether living alone, with children, or with others, described their emotional health more negatively than did the married people.”

If you read this carefully, it isn't saying anything about marriage. Cohabitation in this instance has the quite broad meaning of living with other(s) who could be strangers, relatives, friends, or romantic partners. To better judge the value of the marriage contract, a more appropriate comparison would be exclusively with cohabitors in romantic relationships.

The article does mention that live-in couples are generally less satisfied with their sex lives and break up more than the married but it doesn't get specific. I venture to say that if you controlled for duration of relationship, the health differences between unmarried romantically involved cohabitors and the married would be insignificant (or perhaps cohabitors would be better off). I'd like to see a study of 10 year + cohabitors compared to 10 year + married couples. My guess is, your health isn't going to be any better just because you signed a contract ten years ago.

I'm not quite sure how I managed to make it through three years as a pseudo-econ major without learning the definition of "marginal rate of transformation" but at least I know it now.

It's the ratio of marginal costs of two goods (that is, the amount of capital and labor one would have to shift, a priori, to alter one's potential production between the two good by one unit). It's not, as I had embarrassingly envisioned, the amount of resources it would take a posteriori, to transform (say) a table into (say) a salmon.

Professor Bainbridge, on us: "Crescat Sententia: They aren't the Volokhs, but they're close."

Is the Volokh Conspiracy a family blog? Jacob Levy says yes, Eugene Volokh says no, but also says yes (while, mysteriously, citing his previous answer of no).

Starting today we're going to have a new guest-blogger join us for a little while. Her name is Beth Plocharczyk and she's the proprietor the Chicago-alum-blog Reg Rats, and is well known for her great assistance to this blog on the perplexing Milk Question. She's now doing a dual degree in medicine and public health at Ohio Statue.

I'm not sure what other facts are relevant so I'll let her do the rest.

[Also, feel free to send me, or her, lots of email telling me whether you like her posts.] As everybody here says, Cheers.

In this place there was a rather witless entry claiming to have deduced that Sua Sponte had transferred to Harvard. It was based on a combination of supposition and incorrect information. Chalk it up to the dangers of "sleep-blogging". Thanks to Unfashionable Observations and many readers for catching me out.